The year is going hard and fast, right out of the gate. Multiple RFPs and new customers. New bits of business left and right. And lets not forget the support side … this is using up lots of time as well. Sales hire is almost done … not to offload, but to augment. Need to […]
Storage changes In the beginning of the millenium, Fibre Channel ruled the roost. Nothing could touch it. SATA and SAS were a ways away. SCSI was used in smaller storage systems. Networked storage meant a large central server with ports. SANs were on the rise. In HPC you have to move lots of data. Huge […]
The recycling of an older business model using newer technology ASPs began the decade promising to reduce OPEX and CAPEX for HPC systems. They flamed out, badly, as they really didn’t meet their promise, and you had all these nasty issues of data motion, security, jurisdiction, software licenses, utilization, and compatibility. The concept itself wasn’t […]
Accelerators in HPC … In 2002, my business partner (he wasn’t then), showed me these Cradle SOC chips. 40 cores or something like that, on a single chip, in 2002 time frame. My comment to him was, we should figure out a way to put a whole helluva lotta them (e.g. many chips with RAM […]
The impact of markets, and government upon HPC … While the charts from top500.org are nice, they don’t tell everything that happened in this interval. We had 3 recessions, 2 major (2001 and the “Great Recession”) and 1 minor one. We had significant changes in research funding from the US federal government … a refocusing […]
The relentless onslaught of clusters … We are also mostly doing SMPs and MPPs then. Clusters are barely registering. See the chart and the data to get more perspective. What happened in the market was a simple alteration of the cost scale per flop. Clusters provided massive numbers of cheap cycles. Add to this that […]
The death of RISC … obligatory Monty Python Holy Grail quote: old man: I’m not dead yet, I think I’ll go for a walk John Cleese: Look, you are not fooling anyone … The RISC vendors (SGI, HP, IBM, …) realized that RISC was dead, and that EPIC would be the technology that killed it. […]
[Update: 9-Jan-2010] Link fixed, thanks Shehjar! This is sort of another itch I need to scratch. Please bear with me. This is a long read, and I am breaking it up into multiple posts so you don’t have to read this as a huge novel in and of itself. Many excellent blogs and news sites […]
dstat output on a 10GB pbzip2 compressed file being uncompressed … with pbzip2. —-total-cpu-usage—- -dsk/total- -net/total- —paging– —system– usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read writ| recv send| in out | int csw 49 3 42 5 0 0| 35M 95M|3168B 6978B| 0 28k|1575 1198 52 4 39 5 0 0| 39M 188M|2508B 5230B| 0 […]